Introduction

Kraftwerk, Vert, and the connection between sound and memory.

A while ago I went back to Michigan to visit my parents, and one night, the three of us were sitting around the TV. They probably have two hundred channels, but for some odd reason we were tuned in to TNT's "One Love: The All-Star Bob Marley Tribute." In case you missed it (and I hope you did), this live TV special took performers ranging in relevance from Darius Rucker to Eve and had them cover Marley's songs in front of a live audience in Jamaica. Lauryn Hill, who is married to one of Bob Marley's kids and is now raising his grandchildren, may have organized the thing. Eventually, they made an album out of the idea, the terrible Chant Down Babylon.

It was interesting watching this program with my parents. Here were people like Erykah Badu and Ben Harper, whom I knew something about and had seen in magazines, but had never actually seen moving (I don't have cable). My parents, on the other hand, had never heard of a single performer. But we three intersected with the Marley songs, which we all knew by heart and loved. For the most part, we were having a conversation while half-watching, so it didn't much matter what was actually on. I do remember that we had an interesting discussion about drugs. Maybe Ziggy Marley took the stage at some point looking particularly baked or something, I don't recall. But it was probably the most open conversation I'd had with my parents on the subject.

Anyway, at one point, Busta Rhymes came out and worked the stage, storming around, scowling, howling, etc. Both my parents chuckled at his over-the-top shtick.

"I just don't get this rap stuff," Dad said. "I mean, most of the time, you can't even understand what they're saying."

"The thing about rap, Dad," I said back, "is that the words don't really matter."

My parents were stunned. It was like I'd told them that Johnny Carson was actually Chinese.

"The words don't matter?! Come on! It's nothing but words! It's not like there's a melody you can sing!"

"Yeah...well... uh, it's kind of complicated."

I had difficulty explaining my point, and I offered some half-assed theory about beats and the tone quality of different rapper's voices. Needless to say, they didn't understand rap any better after that night, and I felt confused myself. What I realized immediately after is that the words in rap (and most music, actually) don't matter much to me, but I'm sure they matter a lot to other people. For all I know, some people listen only for the words. Me, I'm more in love with sounds than I am songs, and I don't pay a lot of attention to words in most music I hear. Maybe this has something to do with why I'm not feeling hip-hop much lately, and it could explain why I don't laugh when Markus Popp refers to what he does as "audio."

I would say I have a strong memory, with good recall of events and times and places. But what interests me most about memory are the fragments that float around, which are often difficult to pin down in any kind of meaningful way. The smell of my middle school stairwell. The sound of my old fan rattling in the summertime. The drawings on the board under the top bunk. These are memories not of events but sensations and states of mind. I think that the way I process sound helps me to recall and make connections between these fragments.

I hear the voices in Kraftwerk's "We Are the Robots" and remember how the future looked from the 70's, when I first heard the tune (the future was going to have Cylons). The Folk Implosion's "Raise the Bells" reminds me of music that might have played in the background during a PBS station identification (some Boards of Canada has a similar quality), and I can feel how comforting television seemed then. And I attribute the phenomena, at least in part, to why the tonal quality and textures of certain sounds can trigger emotions, even when the context is a little fuzzy, as when there's not much of a "song" for these sounds to exist in.

I recently wrote about Vert's excellent Nine Types of Ambiguity, but his prior release on Sonig gets very close to what I'm talking about here. The Köln Konzert is a deconstruction/reworking of a very famous and similarly titled Keith Jarrett album. I haven't listened to the Jarrett record in its entirety in probably five years (I always liked In Front a bit more and put that on when I get that solo KJ urge), but hearing Vert's record reminds me of what I love about it, complete as it is with melodic chunks of the original. And yet, while it references some of the highlights, Vert also toys with the listener's memory of the original piece. Something about the DSP gauze he erects between the original work and the listener seems to comment on how the mind stores packets of sound. Certain bits of the original improvisation are alluded to in a very vague way at first-- almost a "tip of the tongue"-type tease-- and then become gradually clearer, as if the brain is working to render them into recognizable form.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way Vert toys with Jarrett's main theme. The theme is featured heavily throughout "Part 1" of Jarrett's original piece. It's a melodic vamp that sways mightily between two chords; one I hear as hesitant, the other as triumphant. Naturally, Jarrett being a master improviser, the melodic variations he weaves on top of the vamp are many (as are his ecstatic and sometimes annoying "oh's" "ahh's" and painfully out of tune squeaking). Vert strips the theme down to just the two chords. In "Part Two" of Vert's piece, the chords seem at first seem like they're moving through about four feet of water before reaching your ear. Buried in digital bubbles and Autechre-style squirms, the melody first arrives on what could be either a synth or the original piano part processed and stretched in the extreme.

Eventually, the chords become clear and move the rest of the sound to the background. They do not, however, ever approach the tone of a piano in "Part Two." Vert saves the full thematic release for the final part of his piece. Again in "Part 5," the refrain arrives buried in processing amid digital debris. After several minutes of the two familiar chords struggling through the morass, the full glory of the piano tone finally presents itself, and the connection to the feelings associated with the Jarrett piece-- joy, triumph, release-- are completely realized. I'm not sure what Vert's piece would do to someone who had never heard the original, but it was enough to send a shiver through my body the first time I heard it. I had a very real and pronounced physical reaction.

When soldiers march across a bridge, they always break stride. This is because it's possible that the frequency at which they move their feet could match the natural resonant frequency of the bridge. When this happens, a chain reaction of sorts happens and the bridge could conceivably vibrate uncontrollably and eventually crash into the river. The same phenomenon explains how Ella Fitzgerald (or a recording of Ella Fitzgerald made on a Memorex cassette) might be able to break a glass with the sound of her voice. She just needs to find the resonant frequency and match its pitch.

This term describes how I feel about music right now. Certain sounds or combinations of sound find their way into a part of my brain and start moving things about in a rather violent way. I'm thinking of the clanging sound that opens Mouse on Mars' "Paradical." Or the voice in Aphex Twin's "Xtal." Or the complicated drone of Janek Schaefer's "Forglen." Or the sound of Jon Thor Birgisson's singing. But when I think about it, all these sounds are more like resonant frequencies in reverse, taking shattered bridges and reassembling them instantly.